Digital Asset Management Vendor Research Toolkit

If you are considering purchasing a new or replacement Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, you need access to some credible and impartial advice. This should be provided by experts who can point to many years of real-world implementation experience dealing with the issues you might face (and how to resolve them). That doesn’t always come cheap, however and justifying spending on consulting services to senior managers can prove difficult.

To help those who require some expert assistance to help them pick the right DAM, but who are on a tight budget, we have put together a package of advice and research into a toolkit composed of three key elements:

A selection strategy report

A vendor features and benchmarking guide

A copy of the our vendor pricing survey (report and data in a spreadsheet)

Each item is described below:

DAM Selection Management Strategy Report

This is an in-depth report 50 page report which describes many of the management issues related to selecting vendor solutions:

How to assess your business case for Digital Asset Management.

What you need to do to prepare for DAM.

How to audit what digital assets and existing systems you already have to decide if you really need software or just need to make better use of what you already have.

What the impact will be on the business (both internally and externally) and how to mitigate risks.

Where to source potential DAM partners.

Identifying a long list of potential partners and rationalising it into a shortlist.

The IT management and technical factors to consider.

Legislative compliance and data protection issues and how to manage them.

How to get the most from external consultants if you do decide to hire them.

Conducting demonstrations and following-up with in-depth reviews.

Devising scripted scenarios for reviews.

Writing an efficient RFP that extracts the information you require without the process becoming onerous for you or the prospective suppliers.

Support and maintenance contracts as well as other legal considerations.

Managing the implementation project once the selection stage is complete.

User adoption issues to consider and some suggested resources.

Also included is a ten page example RFP template and a list of further sources of information.

Analysing DAM Vendor Profiles

The second report: ‘Analysing DAM Vendor Directory Profiles’ explains how to interpret vendor profiles on the DAM vendor searchable directory at damvendors.com. This document is aimed at more hands-on digital asset managers and technical or implementation personnel who need to devise techniques to transform the strategic objectives into deliverable products that the rest of the business can use. Subjects covered include:

Licensing questions and the business implications for on-premise or SaaS/Cloud products.

Hosting options – the pros and cons of each.

Understanding the implications of vendor technology choices.

Search technologies and document indexing.

Metadata including embedded formats like IPTC, XMP, PLUS and ID3.

Business intelligence and reporting.

User auditing and asset usage.

Scalable asset processing and asset manipulation.

Data import/export.

Integration and APIs.

Scripting and plug-ins.

Third party authentication integration with AD, LDAP and SAML.

Multi-lingual issues with metadata and the DAM user interface.

Versioning asset files and metadata

Using the vendor shortlist features

Vendor Pricing Survey

The third item is a copy of our 2016 vendor pricing survey. The 10,000 word, 90 page report includes some highly in-depth research and analysis into the pricing of Digital Asset Management software in 2016.

A scientifically conducted study of DAM vendor pricing using real data entered by DAM vendors who were neither charged nor paid to participate

10,000 word, 90 page pricing survey includes some highly in-depth research and analysis into the pricing of Digital Asset Management software. Details of the vendors who contributed are included in the appendix.

Spreadsheets with original pricing data as entered by participating vendors.

All the reports are provided with an organisation-wide license so as many of your internal staff can benefit from the expertise without incurring unnecessary cost.

This package is a fraction of the price of many competing offerings and the documents are full of practical information about DAM implementation that is suitable for professionals at all levels. The materials have been written by a consultant with over 20 years of experience who has decades of experience of DAM implementation and how to solve them acquired across hundreds of real DAM projects for a range of global clients in both the public and private sectors.

The package can be purchased by end users and is also open to vendors who want to learn more about how to enhance their solutions.